Latest Accessibility News on Accessify

If you happen to find yourself in the lovely surrounds of Boulder, Colorado in November, you may want to make a note of this event taking place (details quoted from press release with some minor editing):

Accessing Higher Ground focuses on the implementation and benefits of Assistive Technology in the university and college setting for sensory, physical and learning disabilities. Other topics include legal and policy issues, including ADA and 508 compliance, and making campus media and information resources - including Web pages and library resources - accessible. Dozens of workshops, lectures, hands-on experience in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.

If you’ve just come back from another annual SXSW Interactive and the thought of returning so soon fills you with a sense of dread (and not just a little amount of concern for your poor, battered liver), look away now. For anyone still reading, here’s the deal: Knowbility are running another AccessU session in that fair city, which they describe as follows:

Knowbility’s annual web and software accessibility institute. Three tracks, two days of classes for administrators, content providers, and technologists in how and why to make IT accessible to everyone. From the basics to the bleeding edge, Access-U will provide the resources you need.

It’s aimed at ‘anyone with interest in and responsibility for accessible IT within business, academia, government agencies and/or the nonprofit sector’. So that’s a fairly wide-rangling group of people. If this sounds of interest to you - and the courses are certainly run by people who know their stuff - then check out the full course description here or register here.

They will be looking at practical solutions to the Web 2.0 accessibility problems, showing cutting edge techniques. We want to make it a very practical day, so that you will come away knowing what you need to do, and where you need to focus to make sure you give access to all users.

Ther is an early bird registration fee which runs out in 2 days (sorry, I only just found out about this event!), with the very reasonable price of £150 for the day. The booking form is here.

If you’re going to run a 2-day conference on AJAX and JavaScript, it’s got to be a good thing if you have the inventor of JavaScript speaking, right? But this AJAX, that nasty enemy of accessibility, right? Shouldn’t we, as the accessibility community, be holding protests at the front gate? Well, no … we have a man on the inside! His name’s Derek and he’ll be doing his best to make sure that those attending get the message about accessible JavaScript/AJAX.

Being serious, though, there are no shortage of conferences bandying the AJAX word around, but the speakers at this gig really are top-notch and I know that many of them, aside from Derek, are also very knowledgeable about the worlds of accessibility and standards in general, so this bodes very well.

Increasingly, I’m using pre-recorded screencasts in my slides – it takes a bit longer to record examples in advance but once I have them, there’s a nice little library of resources to make use of in future presentations. On the day itself, I don’t have to worry about things like flaky internet connections, me fumbling over a control or JAWS timing out on me at a critical moment. The downside to this approach is that the file sizes become very large. I use Keynote on the Mac and with the embedded movie and audio files, the presentation came in at 85mb. This makes it impractical to supply in download format, or at least not without a little care and attention.

But doesn’t the subject line say that the slides are available?

Enter Skitch, a handy little screen capture tool on the Mac that’s currently in Beta testing but is, without a doubt, one of the slickest little pieces of software that I’ve used in years. It makes the process of capturing screenshots and annotating (and then sharing the results) an absolute doddle. So, to get around the issue of the multimedia, I’ve used Skitch to capture the key frames and described the action on screen simply – it is enough for people who attended to get a reminder. (For those who did not attend, well, you’ll have to catch another presentation from me in the future.) Keynote may be Mac only, but it does export to a number of common presentation formats, so here’s the list right here:

Don’t be mistaken by the ‘Public Sector’ part of Public Sector Forums – this time around the organisers are opening the event up to anyone – you don’t need to be working in some dingy council office to apply for this one, anyone’s welcome!

I will be doing a general show and tell, finishing up the day’s events with plenty of real world examples of people getting things wrong-diddly-wrong, including many web sites you know and possibly love.

Sorry. That was a bad Texas Hold’em pun, but if you can grab a seat on this training session, you’ll certainly be playing your cards right, cowboy.

Derek Featherstone is heading back to Texas, so soon after leaving from SXSW, to do a 1-day training course on 7 May at the Alamo Drafthouse (hey, is that a bar, Derek? Sounds suspiciously like it!).

Anyone who knows Derek will vouch that he knows his stuff.

“Want a truly usable, accessible web app? Learn from a world-class teacher how to harness Ajax, break out of your usual development routines, and build intelligently, using the technologies you really need.

We won’t just be covering the basics or theoretical situations. We’ll be examining original research conducted by Derek’s company and real-life test cases. You’ll see assistive technologies and prototypes of new techniques in action. During this intensive workshop we’ll even put a selection of existing web apps through their paces — zeroing in on how well they meet the needs of people with a variety of disabilities.”